KnownWorld

KnownWorld is my own pet project, a complete “nuke and pave” of the core dice mechanics from Palladium Fantasy RPG 1st Edition. While this game is high on my list of favorites for purely sentimental reasons, its core system is to me one of the most tooth-pulling exercises in gaming frustration available on the RPG market. However, the books for it are so rich and detailed that I didn’t want to port it to another system and risk losing all that flavor.

So, to fix this issue I quickly drafted up a set of replacement mechanics, designed to replace the “roll d20 to attack!” and “roll d100 to skill!” mechanics. KnownWorld’s system is a unified set of really simple and obvious dice pools that works perfectly with all the core modifiers and percentages of the standard Palladium rules. Using KnownWorld, there is no real need to house-rule any of the other modifiers and game stats and info-blocks from the printed books unless you just really feel like it.

NOTE MAY 2016: The KnownWorld rules haven’t been updated in a long time, but I’ve brought them back from the dead anyway and put them for free out on GitHub. You can check them out here. They are clunky in some places and in need of serious tweaking (I vaguely remember the armor rules being particularly weird in play). But if you have suggestions, please submit them using that repo.

I found your KnownWorld hack a few years ago and loved it, but no longer have a copy of your changes. The link you have here (http://nathanaelcole.com/stuff/games/KnownWorld.pdf) no longer seems to work, either. Any chance you could dig up the document and repost or e-mail a copy of it to me? :)

Hey I’m very interested in this mod you’ve made. I’ve never actually played Palladium fantasy, but I have played most of the others. I’ve been looking for a rpg to replace 4e D&D, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

I’ve recently decided to run an old school Palladium Fantasy game and ran across your site, and was curious as to your house rules. If you still have them laying about I would be very interested in reading them.